I lifted the lid from the blue-and-white cooler-box beside my stool, took out a bottle of Budweiser, and levered the cap off with my Swiss Army penknife.

Across the road, in the window of Mavis Burton's knitwear shop, the headless, armless torso of her one and only mannequin was wearing the same green tank-top it had been wearing the first time I had seen it, almost six years ago, when I decided to buy the garage. I'd sat here so many hours over the years, looking at that mannequin, that I occasionally considered buying the tank-top myself, just to change the view, but Ialways caught myself just in time.

I slurped beer, scratched my armpit, looked at my watch.

Eventually, a little police car came along the road from the centre of the village and parked outside Mavis's shop. An enormous man shrink-wrapped in a uniform a size too small for him got out and stretched. Even from across the road I could hear seams popping. I checked my watch.

Nigel finished his calisthenics, put on his cap, looked both ways along the road, and crossed over to where I was sitting.

"I make that an hour and forty minutes," I told him. "I'm going to write to the Daily Mail and make a complaint about the standard of rural policing."

"Afternoon, Geoff," said Nigel, touching the brim of his cap and smiling.

I got down off the stool. "It's back here."

On the way past the office, I called through the open window and told Domino to keep an eye on the pumps.

"So," said Nigel, looking at the little blue car and scratching his head. "How many's this, then? Six?"

"Five."

He opened the bonnet and regarded the empty engine s.p.a.ce with the same kind of gravity he would have accorded a murder or a lost kitten. "Well," he said finally, "if n.o.body claims them in six months, I suppose they're yours." He looked at me and smiled sunnily. "Make yourself a fortune, I expect."

The first engineless car had rolled past the garage about a fortnight before, a couple of days after Domino turned up. It had come to a stop, that one indicator flashing, a few yards down the road, completely innocent of driver, pa.s.sengers or motive power, and we had pushed it back into the yard and called the police. n.o.body wanted to drive it, and Nigel was leery about towing it, so we cleared out one of the sheds at the back of the yard and put it in there.

The next day, Nigel returned with the news that the car seemed not to exist. Its vehicle identification number wasn't on record anywhere, and its numberplates weren't registered to any known vehicle. Nigel had a feeling that something not quite legal was going on, but he admitted to not having a clue what it was, and in lieu of further evidence he decided to leave the car with me for the time being.

Three days later, the next one arrived. We put that one in the shed too. And the next. And the next. Now, every time I went out to the pumps to serve a customer, I found myself glancing up the road, just in case I saw another slow-moving vehicle cresting the hill.

Nigel watched Domino and me push the blue car into one of the sheds. Then he watched me padlock the door, just in case someone decided to steal it.

Walking back to his car, Nigel looked through the window of one of the other sheds and said, "I don't remember this one."

I stopped beside him and looked into the shed. "It's my car," I told him.

"Thought you drove a VW."

We stood side by side looking at my Peugeot on the other side of the gla.s.s. I said, "The Volkswagen's Karen's car. We don't have off-road parking, and Laura Gibbs complained when we parked both the cars outside the house."

"Laura lives on your street?"

I nodded.

Nigel shook his head. "She always was a cow, even at school. Never understood it, pretty girl like that."

He looked at me. "Want me to have a word with her?"

"No," I said, suddenly alarmed. "Jesus, Nigel. I'm a big enough laughing-stock around here without you fighting my fights for me."

"You're not a laughing-stock, Geoff," he said.

"No?"

He shook his head again. "But you are the subject of a lot of intense gossip, I will admit that."

"Thank you, Nigel," I said. "Thanks a lot."

After Nigel drove off, I left Domino in charge of the garage and I walked back down the High Street into the village.

Seldon comprised about three dozen houses, one pub, two newsagents, a butcher, a greengrocer, Mavis's knitwear shop, Baxter's Garage, a shoe shop, Vickers & Sons Estate Agents and a sort of pocket branch of Argos, all of them baking slowly in the afternoon heat. The village's population, including toddlers, couldn't have been more than six hundred, but just recently the place had started to look like the car-park of an out-of-town superstore.

The big green BBC Outside Broadcast van was still parked outside The Black Bull. Beside it were carswith foreign number plates and Press stickers on the insides of their windscreens. In the field behind the pub were a couple more vans. One of them had a huge satellite dish mounted on its roof. Beside it was a ragged collection of tents, teepees and benders.

I carried on past the Bull. On the opposite pavement, Jane Wallace was being vox-popped by a CNN news team who looked as if they had all been die-cast from the same perfect mould. Jane was answering their questions with the easy professional grace of someone who has given many many interviews and has already made inquiries about getting an agent.

Outside Argos, the lone representative of a Ukrainian news service was standing, wild-eyed and festooned with cameras, looking for someone to interview. I crossed the road to avoid him, turned left up the next street, walked up my garden path, opened my door, closed it behind me, locked it, bolted it, put the chain on.

I went into the living room, closed the curtains, half-filled a gla.s.s with vodka, and lay down on the settee.

"Another one?" asked Karen from the shadows around the armchair.

I nodded and took a big swallow of vodka.

"That's six now, yes?"

I closed my eyes.

That night, it rained frogs.

2.

"You look awful," said Domino.

"That's the effect I was aiming for." I sorted through the papers on my desk. "So, how does it look?"

He watched me a moment longer, then he looked down at the company books and said, "Do you want the good news or the bad news?"

"Let's work on the a.s.sumption that I only want to hear good news today."

"There isn't any," he said. "You'll be bankrupt by this time next year."

"You gave me a choice," I protested. "Good news or bad news. Give me my good news."

He shook his head. "Grow up, Geoff."

I sat back in the threadbare swivel chair I'd rescued from a fire-damage sale the year I'd bought the business.

"Would you like to hear my opinion?" Domino asked.

"No, thank you."

"Whoever sold this place to you must have walked away jumping into the air, clicking their heels together and shouting yippee."

I looked at him. He had a fresh, unworried, open face and long ash-blond hair. If he hadn't been so tall and hunched-over, he could easily have been taken for a young teenager. I rubbed my eyes.

"It's a petrol station outside a village two miles from a major A-road," he went on. "Be honest with me; how many people charging down the A303 pull off and stop here for petrol?"

There were signs on the Seldon turnoff that pointed to "Local Services"-me, in other words-but most drivers expect their services to be at the end of a fairly short slip-road. People turning off the A303 just sort of drove around for a couple of minutes looking puzzled before getting back onto the main road and going in search of a real service station. I'd put up a sign of my own that read "Seldon Services-2 miles" but the Highways Agency had told me to take it down.

"Your prices are too high, too," Domino went on. "The last few weeks should have quadrupled your takings, at least, but everybody's going to the big service station up the road."

"I can't afford to cut prices," I said.

"It's not your fault." He looked at me with what appeared to be a real expresion of sympathy. "This place was dying on its feet years before you came along." He looked at the books again. "I give you another six months. A year, perhaps."

"Do you want a drink?" I asked.

The lounge bar of The Black Bull was full of journalists and technicians and support staff and scientists. We looked into the snug, and it was more of the same. We went into the public bar, and found a couple of locals neatly corralled along with the fruit machines and the pool table and the s.p.a.ce Invaders machine.

I sat at a corner table, thinking about Domino's a.s.sessment of my business future, while he went to buy drinks. I remembered Andy Hayward's little smile when we finalised the sale of the garage. I wondered what I was going to do, and I discovered that I didn't care very much.

Seven years ago, Karen and I had been living on the top floor of an Islington townhouse that had been converted, not very expertly, into three flats. The couple immediately below us had been going through the world's noisiest divorce, and the ground floor flat belonged to a young woman who had mentioned, just inpa.s.sing, that she was a practicing Satanist. I was working late shifts at Reuter's, and Karen was just making a name for herself ill.u.s.trating childrens' books. We saw each other, if we were lucky, one evening in four.

And one Bank Holiday we drove down to Exeter to visit some friends of Karen's, and on the way back she noticed we were getting a bit light on petrol, so she pulled off the A303 and followed the "Local Services"

sign, and eventually we found ourselves pulling into a little garage with a For Sale notice in the office window.

And while Andy Hayward topped up the car I got out to stretch my legs and was confronted by one of the most peaceful, idyllic village scenes I had ever encountered.

And I lost my mind.

"I hate to see a man drink alone," said Harvey, standing at the other side of the table and grinning down at me.

"I'm not drinking yet."

"I hate to see a man not drinking yet alone," he said.

I smiled. "Everyone says that about you." I watched him pull up a chair and sprawl into it. "How are you?"

"Wonderful," he said with some irony, searching his pockets and finally coming up with a lighter and a tin of small cigars. "I spent this morning shovelling frogs."

"You too?" My part of the village had only caught the edge of the squall, but I'd still had to hose the front path clear of burst little bodies.

He lit a cigar and sat back in his chair. "Still, beats snow, I guess." Harvey was from a little town outside Oshkosh, in Northern Wisconsin, and if he'd had enough beer to get nostalgic he would wax lyrical about his late father having to use a snow-blower just to reach his garage during the winter.

"Or cats and dogs," I reminded him His eyes widened. "Yeah," he said. "That was bad, wasn't it?"

"It was an unusual couple of days," I admitted.

"Had that guy on the roof again last night, too," he told me.

I shrugged. Springheel Jack was, quite frankly, getting boring. By now most of the village had experienced the joy of being woken abruptly by the sound of long fingernails rattling on their slates in the wee small hours.

"At least he's harmless," I said. "People have started leaving a bottle of beer and a plate of sandwiches out for him at night."

"Yes. Right." Harvey pulled a sour face. "That's just what this place needs. A drunken paranormal phenomenon scrambling around on the rooftops scarfing down cheese and pickle sandwiches. That's really going to do wonders for property prices."

"Property prices are going through the roof," I told him. "I was talking to Barry Vickers the other day; he says people are queueing up to buy property here."

"Yes, but those people all believe that the Mayans colonised Mars and that aliens are abducting loggers in the Pacific Northwest and sticking silicon chips up their noses. I don't want people like that for neighbours, no thank you."

"Barry reckons he could get a half a million quid for my house."

He looked at me and raised an eyebrow. "Yeah?"

"Yeah." I couldn't believe he hadn't heard any of this.

"Something's going on," Domino said, coming back from the bar empty-handed. "h.e.l.lo, Harvey."

"Hi," Harvey said.

"Where's my drink?" I asked.

"The journalists are leaving," said Domino.

Harvey and I looked at each other. Now Domino mentioned it, I could hear cars and vans starting up outside. Harvey raised an eyebrow.

"Oh no," I groaned. "It's much too nice a day."

He leaned forward and plucked at my sleeve. "C'mon, Geoffrey. You look like a man who needs an adventure."

"I have all the adventure I need in my front room."

He pulled my sleeve again, grinning. "C'mon."

The convoy wound its way slowly out of the village and into the sweltering countryside, a line of about fifteen vehicles headed by a converted double-decker bus spray-painted with huge dahlias.

"Who the h.e.l.l are they?" Harvey asked, pointing up ahead at the bus.

"Druids," said Domino.